Calling all radionauts, wave artists, transmission enthusiasts, and utopists!

This participatory workshop (conducted via Zoom) introduces you to the realm of spectrum management: the overlapping forces of law, politics, economics & technology that shape the landscape of the electromagnetic spectrum, and thereby the lives of the citizens within it. Up and down the electromagnetic field, we communicate, express our selves, and forge relationships. Our very personhood is therefore bound up in our access to spectrum and its regulation.

For 125+ years, the sheer immaterial strangeness of the radio spectrum has mounted challenge after challenge to the “commonsense” around which our world is ordered: property, territory, the greater good. For, at heart, what *is* spectrum? Is it an invisible continent? common utility? precious natural resource? transcendent ether? Each analogy naturalizes certain ideas about how spectrum can and ought to be used. But our language misleads us.

Together, workshop “articipants” will form a citizens’ assembly of sorts, deliberating these themes. We take in a global view, considering not only the regulatory environment in the US, but also Indigenous legal challenges to spectrum auctions in Aotearoa New Zealand & Turtle Island, grassroots spectrum autonomy in Latin America, and the claims to spectrum by its more-than-human users. We’ll experiment with language and listening to renovate our understanding of spectrum and recover its strangeness. As citizens of spectrum, we will negotiate a “radio treaty” (a ‘treaty’ being, in essence, a score) that professes what rights—and mutual obligations—we might claim to guide our radioventures. Across these prompts, articipants will have the option to submit personal reflections and creative responses to be included in a collaborative radioplay.

Now as ever, the spectrum is a proving ground for some of the most urgent political re-calibrations of our time: the rights and powers of corporate bodies, the nature of the democratic nation-state, Indigenous sovereignty and decolonial governance, overlapping sovereignties within shared territorial environments. In deliberating together over the radio spectrum, may we also find a way to walk together on the earth.

Please register to secure your spot and receive perusal materials in advance of the workshop (though this preparation is not a strict prerequisite for attendance; come as you are).

REGISTER HERE!

Celeste Oram is a composer with equal investments in radiophonic and transmission art, as well as live musical performance in the experimental and classical realms. Oram’s work explores the histories and micro-cultures of musical practice itself, as well as its socio-political entanglements. Her radiophonic pieces employ radio technologies (sometimes DIY) as a musical instrument in the pursuit of richly contrapuntal sonic textures. Often Oram’s work engages with the histories and cultures of both public and amateur radio, and their entwined development with colonialism and nation-building—especially in her home country Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent compositions for live performance span instrumental and vocal concert music, polyphonic songs, music for period Baroque instruments, experimental music-theatre, and orchestral music for dance-theater. Much of Oram’s musical language is rooted in a studied investment in early music, revivifying historical musical languages via experimental approaches. https://celesteoram.com/